Increasing numbers of motor vehicles are provided, for safety purposes, with detection systems including electronic enclosures mounted on each of the wheels of the vehicle, enclosing sensors used for measuring parameters such as the radial acceleration of the wheel and the pressure and temperature of the tires fitted to these wheels.
In addition to the measurement of the usual parameters intended to provide the driver with direct information on operating parameters of the wheels, it has also been considered useful to provide additional information, including characteristic data of the contact patch of the tire on the ground, which enable the load on each wheel of the vehicle to be estimated, notably by the central unit.
However, the calculation of the values of these characteristic data of the contact patch of the tire, carried out by the processor integrated into each electronic module, has proved to be costly in terms of the calculation time of said processor, and therefore highly energy-intensive.
Consequently, in order to preserve the life of the battery that powers each electronic enclosure, the characteristics of the contact patch of the tires are currently calculated only during the first minutes of running of vehicles after a long stationary period.
This restriction imposed for reasons of energy saving means that it is impossible to detect a large number of situations in which a knowledge of the variation of characteristic data of the contact patch of tires could provide useful information for the operation of the central unit and the control of the parameters processed by this unit.
The present invention is intended to overcome this drawback, and has the primary object of providing a method for controlling a processor of an electronic enclosure which minimizes the effect on energy consumption of the operations of monitoring the variation of the characteristics of the contact patch of the tires, and which enables the useful information relating to this variation to be calculated and transmitted to a central unit, regardless of the running phase.